Enoch Soames
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Enoch Soames
A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties
By MAX BEERBOHM
WHEN a book about the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by
Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for
Soames, Enoch. It was as I feared: he was not there. But everybody else
was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but
faintly, lived again for me, they and their work, in Mr. Holbrook
Jackson's pages. The book was as thorough as it was brilliantly written.
And thus the omission found by me was an all the deadlier record of poor
Soames's failure to impress himself on his decade.
I dare say I am the only person who noticed the omission. Soames
had failed so piteously as all that! Nor is there a counterpoise in the
thought that if he had had some measure of success he might have
passed, like those others, out of my mind, to return only at the historian's
beck. It is true that had his gifts, such as they were, been acknowledged
in his lifetime, he would never have made the bargain I saw him
make--that strange bargain whose results have kept him always in the
foreground of my memory. But it is from those very results that the full
piteousness of him glares out.
Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his
sake, poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It
is ill to deride the dead. And how can I write about Enoch Soames
without making him ridiculous? Or, rather, how am I to hush up the
horrid fact that he WAS ridiculous? I shall not be able to do that.
Yet, sooner or later, write about him I must. You will see in due course
that I have no option. And I may as well get the thing done now.
IN the summer term of '93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford.
It drove deep; it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and
undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it.
Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will
Rothenstein. Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in
lithograph. These were to be published from the Bodley Head, London.
The matter was urgent. Already the warden of A, and the master of B,
and the Regius Professor of C had meekly "sat." Dignified and doddering
old men who had never consented to sit to any one could not withtand this
dynamic little stranger. He did not sue; he invited: he did not invite; he
commanded. He was twenty-one years old. He wore spectacles that
flashed more than any other pair ever seen. He was a wit. He was
brimful of ideas. He knew Whistler. He knew Daudet and the
Goncourts. He knew every one in Paris. He knew them all by heart. He
was Paris in Oxford. It was whispered that, so soon as he had polished
off his selection of dons, he was going to include a few undergraduates.
It was a proud day for me when I--I was included. I liked Rothenstein
not less than I feared him; and there arose between us a friendship that
has grown ever warmer, and been more and more valued by me, with
every passing year.
At the end of term he settled in, or, rather, meteoritically into,
London. It was to him I owed my first knowledge of that
forever-enchanting little world-in-itself, Chelsea, and my first
acquaintance with Walter Sickert and other August elders who dwelt
there. It was Rothenstein that took me to see, in Cambridge Street,
Pimlico, a young man whose drawings were already famous among the
few--Aubrey Beardsley by name. With Rothenstein I paid my first visit
to the Bodley Head. By him I was inducted into another haunt of
intellect and daring, the domino-room of the Cafe Royal.
There, on that October evening--there, in that exuberant vista of
gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and
upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and
pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation
broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled
on marble tables, I drew a deep breath and, "This indeed," said I to
myself, "is life!" (Forgive me that theory. Remember the waging of even
the South African War was not yet.)
It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermuth. Those who
knew Rothenstein were pointing him out to those who knew him only by
name. Men were constantly coming in through the swing-doors and
wandering slowly up and down in search of vacant tables or of tables
occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was
sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein's eye. He had twice passed our
table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a
disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a
stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and
brownish hair. He had a thin, vague beard, or, rather, he had a chin on
which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its
retreat. He was an odd-looking person; but in the nineties odd
apparitions were more frequent, I think, than they are now. The young
writers of that era--and I was sure this man was a writer--strove earnestly
to be distinct in aspect. This man had striven unsuccessfully. He wore a
soft black hat of clerical kind, but of Bohemian intention, and a gray
waterproof cape which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be
romantic. I decided that "dim" was the mot juste for him. I had
already essayed to write, and was immensely keen on the mot
juste , that Holy Grail of the period.
The dim man was now again approaching our table, and this time
he made up his mind to pause in front of it.
"You don't remember me," he said in a toneless voice.
Rothenstein brightly focused him.
"Yes, I do," he replied after a moment, with pride rather than
effusion--pride in a retentive memory. "Edwin Soames."
"Enoch Soames," said Enoch.
"Enoch Soames," repeated Rothenstein in a tone implying that it
was enough to have hit on the surname. "We met in Paris a few times
when you were living there. We met at the Cafe Groche."
"And I came to your studio once."
"Oh, yes; I was sorry I was out."
"But you were in. You showed me some of your paintings, you
know. I hear you're in Chelsea now."
"Yes."
I almost wondered that Mr. Soames did not, after this monosyllable,
pass along. He stood patiently there, rather like a dumb animal,
rather like a donkey looking over a gate. A sad figure, his. It occurred to
me that "hungry" was perhaps the mot juste for him; but--hungry
for what? He looked as if he had little appetite for anything. I was sorry
for him; and Rothenstein, though he had not invited him to Chelsea, did
ask him to sit down and have something to drink.
Seated, he was more self-assertive. He flung back the wings of his
cape with a gesture which, had not those wings been waterproof, might
have seemed to hurl defiance at things in general. And he ordered an
absinthe. "Je me tiens toujours fidele," he told
Rothenstein, "a la sorcieere glauque."
"It is bad for you," said Rothenstein, dryly.
"Nothing is bad for one," answered Soames. "Dans ce monde il n'y
a ni bien ni mal."
"Nothing good and nothing bad? How do you mean?"
"I explained it all in the preface to 'Negations.'"
"'Negations'?"
"Yes, I gave you a copy of it."
"Oh, yes, of course. But, did you explain, for instance, that there
was no such thing as bad or good grammar?"
"N-no," said Soames. "Of course in art there is the good and the
evil. But in life--no." He was rolling a cigarette. He had weak, white
hands, not well washed, and with finger-tips much stained with nicotine.
"In life there are illusions of good and evil, but"--his voice trailed away
to a murmur in which the words "vieux jeu" and "rococo" were
faintly audible. I think he felt he was not doing himself justice, and
feared that Rothenstein was going to point out fallacies. Anyhow, he
cleared his throat and said, "Parlons d'autre chose."
It occurs to you that he was a fool? It didn't to me. I was young,
and had not the clarity of judgment that Rothenstein already had.
Soames was quite five or six years older than either of us. Also--he had
written a book. It was wonderful to have written a book.
If Rothenstein had not been there, I should have revered Soames.
Even as it was, I respected him. And I was very near indeed to reverence
when he said he had another book coming out soon. I asked if I might
ask what kind of book it was to be.
"My poems," he answered. Rothenstein asked if this was to be the
title of the book. The poet meditated on this suggestion, but said he
rather thought of giving the book no title at all. "If a book is good in
itself--" he murmured, and waved his cigarette.
Rothenstein objected that absence of title might be bad for the sale
of a book.
"If," he urged, "I went into a bookseller's and said simply, 'Have
you got?' or, 'Have you a copy of?' how would they know what I
wanted?"
"Oh, of course I should have my name on the cover," Soames
answered earnestly. "And I rather want," he added, looking hard at
Rothenstein, "to have a drawing of myself as frontispiece." Rothenstein
admitted that this was a capital idea, and mentioned that he was going
into the country and would be there for some time. He then looked at his
watch, exclaimed at the hour, paid the waiter, and went away with me to
dinner. Soames remained at his post of fidelity to the glaucous witch.
"Why were you so determined not to draw him?" I asked.
"Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn't exist?"
"He is dim," I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat.
Rothenstein repeated that Soames was non-existent.
Still, Soames had written a book. I asked if Rothenstein had read
"Negations." He said he had looked into it, "but," he added crisply, "I
don't profess to know anything about writing." A reservation very
characteristic of the period! Painters would not then allow that any one
outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. This
law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit
of Fuji-yama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting
were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practiced
them, the law tottered--the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold
good. Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without
warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one is a
better judge of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn't have done to
tell him so in those days, and I knew that I must form an unaided
judgment of "Negations."
Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would
have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. When I
returned to Oxford for the Christmas term I had duly secured
"Negations." I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room,
and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about, I would
say: "Oh, it's rather a remarkable book. It's by a man whom I know."
Just "what it was about" I never was able to say. Head or tail was just
what I hadn't made of that slim, green volume. I found in the preface no
clue to the labyrinth of contents, and in that labyrinth nothing to explain
the preface.
Lean near to life. Lean very near--
nearer.
Life is web and therein nor warp nor
woof is, but web only.
It is for this I am Catholick in church
and in thought, yet do let swift Mood weave
there what the shuttle of Mood wills.
These were the opening phrases of the preface, but those which
followed were less easy to understand. Then came "Stark: A
Conte," about a midinette who, so far as I could gather,
murdered, or was about to murder, a mannequin. It was rather
like a story by Catulle Mendes in which the translator had either
skipped or cut out every alternate sentence. Next, a dialogue between
Pan and St. Ursula, lacking, I rather thought, in "snap." Next, some
aphorisms (entitled [Greek omitted]). Throughout, in fact, there was a
great variety of form, and the forms had evidently been wrought with
much care. It was rather the substance that eluded me. Was there, I
wondered, any substance at all? It did not occur to me: suppose Enoch
Soames was a fool! Up cropped a rival hypothesis: suppose _I_
was! I inclined to give Soames the benefit of the doubt. I had read
"L'Apres-midi d'un faune" without extracting a glimmer of
meaning; yet Mallarme, of course, was a master. How was I to
know that Soames wasn't another? There was a sort of music in his
prose, not indeed, arresting, but perhaps, I thought, haunting, and laden,
perhaps, with meanings as deep as Mallarme's own. I awaited his
poems with an open mind.
And I looked forward to them with positive impatience after I had
had a second meeting with him. This was on an evening in January.
Going into the aforesaid domino-room, I had passed a table at which sat
a pale man with an open book before him. He had looked from his book
to me, and I looked back over my shoulder with a vague sense that I
ought to have recognized him. I returned to pay my respects. After
exchanging a few words, I said with a glance to the open book, "I see I
am interrupting you," and was about to pass on, but, "I prefer,' Soames
replied in his toneless voice, "to be interrupted," and I obeyed his gesture
that I should sit down.
I asked him if he often read here.
"Yes; things of this kind I read here," he answered, indicating the
title of his book--"The Poems of Shelley."
"Anything that you really"--and I was going to say "admire?" But I
cautiously left my sentence unfinished, and was glad that I had done so,
for he said with unwonted emphasis, "Anything second-rate."
I had read little of Shelley, but, "Of course," I murmured, "he's very
uneven."
"I should have thought evenness was just what was wrong with
him. A deadly evenness. That's why I read him here. The noise of this
place breaks the rhythm. He's tolerable here." Soames took up the book
and glanced through the pages. He laughed. Soames's laugh was a short,
single, and mirthless sound from the throat, unaccompanied by any
movement of the face or brightening of the eyes. "What a period!"
he uttered, laying the book down. And, "What a country!" he added.
I asked rather nervously if he didn't think Keats had more or less
held his own against the drawbacks of time and place. He admitted that
there were "passages in Keats," but did not specify them. Of "the older
men," as he called them, he seemed to like only Milton. "Milton," he
said, "wasn't sentimental." Also, "Milton had a dark insight." And again,
"I can always read Milton in the reading-room."
"The reading-room?"
"Of the British Museum. I go there every day."
"You do? I've only been there once. I'm afraid I found it rather a
depressing place. It--it seemed to sap one's vitality."
"It does. That's why I go there. The lower one's vitality, the more
sensitive one is to great art. I live near the museum. I have rooms in
Dyatt Street."
"And you go round to the reading-room to read Milton?"
"Usually Milton." He looked at me. "It was Milton," he
certificatively added, "who converted me to diabolism."
"Diabolism? Oh, yes? Really?" said I, with that vague discomfort
and that intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of
his own religion. "You--worship the devil?"
Soames shook his head.
"It's not exactly worship," he qualified, sipping his absinthe. "It's
more a matter of trusting and encouraging."
"I see, yes. I had rather gathered from the preface to 'Negations'
that you were a--a Catholic."
"Je l'etais a cette epoque. In fact, I still am.
I am a Catholic diabolist."
But this profession he made in an almost cursory tone. I could see
that what was upmost in his mind was the fact that I had read
"Negations." His pale eyes had for the first time gleamed. I felt as one
who is about to be examined viva voce on the very subject in
which he is shakiest. I hastily asked him how soon his poems were to be
published.
"Next week," he told me.
"And are they to be published without a title?"
"No. I found a title at last. But I sha'n't tell you what it is," as
though I had been so impertinent as to inquire. "I am not sure that it
wholly satisfies me. But it is the best I can find. It suggests something
of the quality of the poems--strange growths, natural and wild, yet
exquisite," he added, "and many-hued, and full of poisons."
I asked him what he thought of Baudelaire. He uttered the snort
that was his laugh, and, "Baudelaire," he said, "was a bourgeois
malgre lui." France had had only one poet--Villon; "and two
thirds of Villon were sheer journalism." Verlaine was "an
epicier malgre lui." Altogether, rather to my
surprise, he rated French literature lower than English. There were
"passages" in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. But, "I," he summed up, "owe
nothing to France." He nodded at me. "You'll see," he predicted.
I did not, when the time came, quite see that. I thought the author
of "Fungoids" did, unconsciously of course, owe something to the young
Parisian decadents or to the young English ones who owed something to
THEM. I still think so. The little book, bought by me in Oxford,
lies before me as I write. Its pale-gray buckram cover and silver lettering
have not worn well. Nor have its contents. Through these, with a
melancholy interest, I have again been looking. They are not much. But
at the time of their publication I had a vague suspicion that they
MIGHT be. I suppose it is my capacity for faith, not poor Soames's
work, that is weaker than it once was.
TO A YOUNG WOMAN
THOU ART, WHO HAST NOT BEEN!
Pale tunes irresolute
And traceries of old sounds
Blown from a rotted flute
Mingle with noise of cymbals rouged with
rust,
Nor not strange forms and epicene
Lie bleeding in the dust,
Being wounded with wounds.
For this it is
That in thy counterpart
Of age-long mockeries
THOU HAST NOT BEEN NOR ART!
There seemed to me a certain inconsistency as between the first and
last lines of this. I tried, with bent brows, to resolve the discord. But I
did not take my failure as wholly incompatible with a meaning in
Soames's mind. Might it not rather indicate the depth of his meaning?
As for the craftsmanship, "rouged with rust' seemed to me a fine stroke,
and "nor not" instead of "and" had a curious felicity. I wondered who the
"young woman" was and what she had made of it all. I sadly suspect
that Soames could not have made more of it than she. Yet even now, if
one doesn't try to make any sense at all of the poem, and reads it just for
the sound, there is a certain grace of cadence. Soames was an artist, in so
far as he was anything, poor fellow!
It seemed to me, when first I read "Fungoids," that, oddly enough,
the diabolistic side of him was the best. Diabolism seemed to be a
cheerful, even a wholesome influence in his life.
NOCTURNE
Round and round the shutter'd Square
I strolled with the Devil's arm in mine.
No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was
there
And the ring of his laughter and mine.
We had drunk black wine.
I scream'd, "I will race you, Master!"
"What matter," he shriek'd, "to-night
Which of us runs the faster?
There is nothing to fear to-night
In the foul moon's light!"
Then I look'd him in the eyes
And I laugh'd full shrill at the lie he told
And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.
It was true, what I'd time and again been told:
He was old--old.
There was, I felt, quite a swing about that first stanza--a joyous and
rollicking note of comradeship. The second was slightly hysterical,
perhaps. But I liked the third, it was so bracingly unorthodox, even
according to the tenets of Soames's peculiar sect in the faith. Not much
"trusting and encouraging" here! Soames triumphantly exposing the
devil as a liar, and laughing "full shrill," cut a quite heartening figure, I
thought, then! Now, in the light of what befell, none of his other poems
depresses me so much as "Nocturne."
I looked out for what the metropolitan reviewers would have to say.
They seemed to fall into two classes: those who had little to say and
those who had nothing. The second class was the larger, and the words
of the first were cold; insomuch that
Strikes a note of modernity. . . . These tripping numbers.--"The
Preston Telegraph."
was the only lure offered in advertisements by Soames's publisher. I had
hoped that when next I met the poet I could congratulate him on having
made a stir, for I fancied he was not so sure of his intrinsic greatness as
he seemed. I was but able to say, rather coarsely, when next I did see
him, that I hoped "Fungoids" was "selling splendidly." He looked at me
across his glass of absinthe and asked if I had bought a copy. His
publisher had told him that three had been sold. I laughed, as at a jest.
"You don't suppose I CARE, do you?" he said, with
something like a snarl. I disclaimed the notion. He added that he was
not a tradesman. I said mildly that I wasn't, either, and murmured that an
artist who gave truly new and great things to the world had always to
wait long for recognition. He said he cared not a sou for recognition. I
agreed that the act of creation was its own reward.
His moroseness might have alienated me if I had regarded myself as
a nobody. But ah! hadn't both John Lane and Aubrey Beardsley
suggested that I should write an essay for the great new venture
that was afoot--"The Yellow Book"? And hadn't Henry Harland, as
editor, accepted my essay? And wasn't it to be in the very first number?
At Oxford I was still in statu pupillari. In London I regarded
myself as very much indeed a graduate now--one whom no Soames could
ruffle. Partly to show off, partly in sheer good-will, I told Soames he
ought to contribute to "The Yellow Book." He uttered from the throat a
sound of scorn for that publication.
Nevertheless, I did, a day or two later, tentatively ask Harland if he
knew anything of the work of a man called Enoch Soames. Harland
paused in the midst of his characteristic stride around the room, threw up
his hands toward the ceiling, and groaned aloud: he had often met "that
absurd creature" in Paris, and this very morning had received some
poems in manuscript from him.
"Has he NO talent?" I asked.
"He has an income. He's all right." Harland was the most joyous
of men and most generous of critics, and he hated to talk of anything
about which he couldn't be enthusiastic. So I dropped the subject of
Soames. The news that Soames had an income did take the edge off
solicitude. I learned afterward that he was the son of an unsuccessful and
deceased bookseller in Preston, but had inherited an annuity of three
hundred pounds from a married aunt, and had no surviving relatives of
any kind. Materially, then, he was "all right." But there was still a
spiritual pathos about him, sharpened for me now by the possibility that
even the praises of "The Preston Telegraph" might not have been
forthcoming had he not been the son of a Preston man He had a sort of
weak doggedness which I could not but admire. Neither he nor his work
received the slightest encouragement; but he persisted in behaving as a
personage: always he kept his dingy little flag flying. Wherever
congregated the jeunes feroces of the arts, in whatever
Soho restaurant they had just discovered, in whatever music-hall they
were most frequently, there was Soames in the midst of them, or, rather,
on the fringe of them, a dim, but inevitable, figure. He never sought to
propitiate his fellow-writers, never bated a jot of his arrogance about his
own work or of his contempt for theirs. To the painters he was
respectful, even humble; but for the poets and prosaists of "The Yellow
Book" and later of "The Savoy" he had never a word but of scorn. He
wasn't resented. It didn't occur to anybody that he or his Catholic
diabolism mattered. When, in the autumn of '96, he brought out (at his
own expense, this time) a third book, his last book, nobody said a word
for or against it. I meant, but forgot, to buy it. I never saw it, and am
ashamed to say I don't even remember what it was called. But I did, at
the time of its publication, say to Rothenstein that I thought poor old
Soames was really a rather tragic figure, and that I believed he would
literally die for want of recognition. Rothenstein scoffed. He said I was
trying to get credit for a kind heart which I didn't possess; and perhaps
this was so. But at the private view of the New English Art Club, a few
weeks later, I beheld a pastel portrait of "Enoch Soames, Esq." It was
very like him, and very like Rothenstein to have done it. Soames was
standing near it, in his soft hat and his waterproof cape, all through the
afternoon. Anybody who knew him would have recognized the portrait
at a glance, but nobody who didn't know him would have recognized the
portrait from its bystander: it "existed" so much more than he; it was
bound to. Also, it had not that expression of faint happiness which on
that day was discernible, yes, in Soames's countenance. Fame had
breathed on him. Twice again in the course of the month I went to the
New English, and on both occasions Soames himself was on view there.
Looking back, I regard the close of that exhibition as having been
virtually the close of his career. He had felt the breath of Fame against
his cheek--so late, for such a little while; and at its withdrawal he gave in,
gave up, gave out. He, who had never looked strong or well, looked
ghastly now--a shadow of the shade he had once been. He still
frequented the domino-room, but having lost all wish to excite curiosity,
he no longer read books there. "You read only at the museum now?" I
asked, with attempted cheerfulness. He said he never went there now.
"No absinthe there," he muttered. It was the sort of thing that in old days
he would have said for effect; but it carried conviction now. Absinthe,
erst but a point in the "personality" he had striven so hard to build up,
was solace and necessity now. He no longer called it "la
sorciere glauque." He had shed away all his French phrases.
He had become a plain, unvarnished Preston man.